Too Late to Turn Back E-Book

Barbara Greene

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

It had been Graham Greene's idea to explore tropical West Africa.The map of Liberia was virtually blank, the interior marked 'cannibals'. It was a far cry from the literary London of 1935, and the result of the 350-mile trek was the masterclass in travel writing that is Journey Without Maps. But the gifted author was not travelling alone. His cousin Barbara had, over perhaps a little too much champagne, rashly agreed to go with him. Unbeknown to him, she also took up pen and paper on their long and arduous journey.Too Late to Turn Back is the amusing, mock-heroic and richly evocative adventure of a young woman who set out from the world of Saki and the Savoy Grill armed only with a cheery stoicism and an eye for an anecdote. From her exasperation at her cousin's refusal to pull his socks up to her concern over his alarmingly close scrape with death, from her yearning for smoked salmon to the missionary who kept a pet cobra, what emerges is a surprisingly refreshing and charming travelogue of comic misadventure, fizzing with good.

Leseprobe

‘Few journeys have been so well recorded.’ Paul Theroux

‘Too Late to Turn Back could absolutely have stood alone as an illuminating and informative account of this tour through unknown territory. That it also provides an intimate observation of one of the most famous British writers of the twentieth century is the icing on the cake.’ Lucy Scholes, Paris Review

‘Lively and sensitive.’ Daily Telegraph

‘An insanely risky literary adventure … an act of breath-taking unconventionality.’ Observer

To all my dear friends past and present but particularly to Amadu, Laminah, Cook and Mark

Contents

Title PageDedicationIntroductionForewordA Note from the PublisherChapter IChapter IIChapter IIIChapter IVChapter VChapter VIChapter VIIChapter VIIIChapter IXChapter XChapter XIChapter XIIChapter XIIIChapter XIVAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyright

Introduction

It is a cold January morning in 1935. The steamboat, SS David Livingstone, slips out of Liverpool docks under a low grey sky on its standard cargo service to the west coast of Africa. Amongst the seven passengers listed in the manifest are two Greenes: H. G. Greene of 9 Woodstock Close, Oxford, is the writer, Graham Greene, with five novels and a reputation already under his belt at the age of thirty-one; the other, with a London address, is Graham’s first cousin, twenty-seven-year-old Barbara. Or maybe we should start in October 1934 at a Greene family wedding reception, when after a few glasses of champagne, Barbara impulsively agreed to go with Graham to Liberia, ‘wherever it was’. She looked it up in The British Encyclopaedia. The only maps Graham Greene could find showed a few dotted lines for the ‘probable course of rivers’, and areas marked ‘jungle’, ‘wild animals’ and ‘cannibals’. Their other source of information, a British Government Blue Book, listed the endemic diseases: yellow fever, plague, elephantiasis, leprosy, yaws, malaria, hookworm, schistosomiasis, dysentery, smallpox; and swarming populations of rats.

Liberia was the first modern African republic. In the 1820s territory had been bought (sometimes at gunpoint) from the local rulers on what was known as the Grain Coast of Africa (after a pepper spice traded in the area) with American money so that freed slaves and the illegitimate children of slave owners could go back to Africa. This was a sort of conscience-salve and a way of disappearing a problem in one, for many were freed on condition they emigrate. From 1822–1861, 15,000 African Americans and 3,100 African Caribbeans were shipped in to form the new country, settling along the coast. In 1847 they attained independence but the ideal of freedom behind the name Liberia (for ‘Land of the Free’) would not resonate with the indigenous peoples of the interior. The Black minority settler elite who survived (disease meant many didn’t) monopolised the positions of power, imposed punitive tax collections, and clashed violently with the local tribes. In 1923 came reports of shipments of forced labour from Liberia to the Spanish colony of Fernando Po. In 1926, the American rubber company, Firestone, leased a million acres for latex production, and interesting to this story is that a New York Times article on Firestone’s investment noted ‘Carrying forty or fifty pounds all day long on his head is said to be nothing to a native Liberian.’ Allegations of modern slavery began to filter out.

The story goes that Graham Greene wanted an African experience to probe into his own Heart of Darkness and he didn’t want to take a well-worn road. Indeed, Liberia in 1935 was around 43,000 square miles of forest with neither roads nor navigable rivers. For the resulting book of his journey through the hinterland, he had received an advance of £350 from his publishers, William Heinemann. In secret, he had also been recruited by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society, which wanted someone to investigate the allegations of slavery. That Barbara accompanied him on what would turn out to be a 350-mile trek through unmapped land was, he allowed, because everyone else had refused. The truth was he couldn’t have found a better travelling companion.

Barbara sensed her ‘conventional little mind’ irritated him, ‘But we never quarrelled, not once.’ Not once do they walk side by side, however, and it isn’t long before the only subject they can discuss, by tacit agreement, is food. What he missed she gives us, in line after line of her bright, and so often witty, observations. ‘I got out my diary and wrote down what I thought of him. His brain frightened me. It was sharp and clear and cruel. I admired him for being unsentimental, but “always remember to rely on yourself”, I noted. “If you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you.”’ However, Graham Greene’s book of the expedition, Journey Without Maps, does not in fact note her reactions. Barbara is mentioned just once by name, and then moved to the shadows as an infrequent vague presence (‘my cousin’) without voice. Also unnoticed by Graham was that his steadfast cousin was meticulously jotting down every interesting detail in her diary. ‘I was learning far more than he realised,’ she writes.

Let us hover over the Liberian jungle and time-travel back to January 1935. The unending green is veined with a narrow red clay path, a day’s walk to the next remote village. We will not see two white perspiring figures in pith helmets bent beneath their canvas knapsacks, with two or three local guides as I’d imagined. Oh no. To facilitate the Greenes’ journey is a straggling train of thirty-two human souls, along with one monkey, one goat and five chickens. I see the entourage as a living metonym for the Great Chain of Being, that hierarchal order of life (and servitude) down through ranks that held, since Aristotle, such pervasive influence on Western thought. The procurement of labour, after all, is the dark sorrow of Africa, and the basic systems grimly endured. For three shillings a week and one meal daily, the barefooted carriers (including the hammock-bearers hired to carry Graham or Barbara when required) will bear fifty pounds of luggage all day long on their heads, in the heat, from village to village, chewing kola nuts for the caffeine to sustain them. Modern jaws will drop at the inventory: a wooden table, two chairs, two beds, bedding, mosquito nets, a tent (in case they don’t find a village before nightfall, and remember nothing is lightweight in 1935), a tin bath, a water filter, all the paraphernalia for cooking and eating, and tins and tins of food: bully beef, sausages, turnips (why?), golden syrup; a case of whisky (or two), a gun, a money box, and two leather Revelation suitcases. The irony, considering Graham’s covert mission, swings in the breeze with the hammocks.

The journey teems with paradox. The imperialist trope predisposes the Greenes to view their attendants as children, yet Barbara also sees herself as a child, and ‘the baby of a large family’. And they are overawed by the dignity of their hired retainers, particularly by Graham’s manservant, Amadu. ‘Would we ever be able to live up to them?’ Barbara asks. ‘Because of Amadu we could not swear if we were angry, I could not cry if I was hurt, we invariably displayed the greatest courtesy towards one another.’

As Graham races ahead, impatient for his ‘smash and grab raid into the primitive’ (his description) to be over, Barbara wants to linger inland as long as possible. She is in her element when her party gets lost, and crestfallen when reunited too soon and once again being ‘too much looked after’. The lark of going to Liberia had taken a far more profound turn than she had ever anticipated. While Graham’s metaphorical stethoscope is pressed to his soul, Barbara is far more interested in the people they are with and those they encounter. Her easy intimacy engages everyone. There is nothing precious or pompous about Barbara. The girls in the villages pour into her hut. ‘Although we could exchange no word, we laughed together … I felt I was among people I liked.’ Where Graham is tense and fidgety, Barbara is conscious of being perfectly happy. ‘I began quite suddenly to feel the overwhelming magic of Africa.’ She peers out of her window into the night. ‘I was part of it somehow … It meant something deeper and more valuable to me now.’

Nothing sets the scene better than the Greenes’ choice of reading matter. Barbara takes Saki and Somerset Maugham; Graham chooses The Anatomy of Melancholy, all 900 pages published in 1621 with the full title: The Anatomy ofMelancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes,Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three MainePartitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections.Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up. Seriously. And as Graham weakens from heat, impatience, and Symptomes of a mysterious fever that manifest in eternal hunger (a tapeworm?), Barbara flourishes, becoming fitter and stronger, feeling better than ever. Here is a young woman who, as she admits, has been spoilt all her life: a flat in London, a maid, her bath run for her, her evening clothes spread out on her bed. A bright young upper-middle-class thing in a pre-war world, subbed by a father who made his fortune from the coffee trade in Brazil. Yet she turns out to be remarkable. She is bitten all over, her clothes are infested with bugs, her feet bleed and parasitic ‘jiggers’ worm their way beneath her toenails. The village huts where they sleep shake with rats, yet after a few days she does not mind. She leaves her hairbrush out one night, by the next morning all the bristles have been eaten by rats, so for the next two months she does not brush her hair again. ‘It got stiff with dust and stood out round my head like a halo.’ The soles of her shoes wear out so she tries packing them with cardboard (it doesn’t work). She couldn’t give a hoot. Barbara is vibrant yet self-effacing, modest yet master of the deadpan line. And she never, ever complains. She pokes fun not only at herself, but at the pretensions of her class. ‘Two white dolls sitting stiffly on absurd green canvas chairs, drinking whisky.’ TooLate to Turn Back is a bit like going with Audrey Hepburn on a Liberian Holiday.

I don’t think I was supposed to laugh quite so much. Ever loyal and compliant, Barbara endorses the gender role that thrived in 1935, while quietly subverting it. Rueful yet benign, submitting to imperialist attitudes at the same time as satirising them, any performance – including her own – gets a gentle mocking. Her eye for detail delivers a stream of gorgeous set-pieces: the annoyance at Graham’s slipping socks, which reaches obsession (more than a page); her confession to boredom with the never-ending trees; Graham’s nervous twitch. Her mere presence debunks any notion of the hero. ‘Graham, I noticed, was coming out in boils. I was not surprised.’

But after they disobeyed instructions not to look outside one night when ‘the devil’ was dancing, Graham took a turn for the worse. Being ill in the bush was dangerous. ‘Graham would die. I never doubted it for a minute. He looked like a dead man already.’ Barbara plied him with whisky and Epsom salts then calmly worked out how she would have him buried, how she would reach the coast with Amadu, and to whom she would send telegrams. She became preoccupied with where she might get candles for a Catholic mass. And yet: ‘To my great surprise Graham was not dead in the morning.’ Hardly a spoiler. He had a lot of books to write.

There is no way around the reprehensible colonial vocabulary of the day. ‘Boy’ for man is just a pinprick in the refuse heap. Through Barbara’s eyes Graham treats the men ‘as if they were white men from our own country’. As if. This was a patronising relationship of normalised subjugation and exploitation. My abiding worry is how the porters, having been paid and dismissed at the end of the four-week journey, then fleeced by the locals on the coast in Grand Bassa, made it back to their home in Bolahun, 350 miles away. Similarly, some descriptions of people would not be countenanced today. Many bore the scars of sickness and pox, as disease was rife and medical treatment almost non-existent. This is also a social-historical document with legacies that remain. A work in slow progress. There is a moving passage that, for me, lays bare our conflicted humanity.

Our ugliest, most hideous porter brought me a little bouquet of flowers every morning to pin on the front of my shirt, for he had observed me doing it one morning. With a shy grin that crumpled up his entire face he would present it to me, and I would express my thanks with smiles and bows. They were charming to us, and we got to know them so well.

Barbara’s version of their walk was supposedly never intended to be published, and Graham was ‘disappointed’ when it was. A trespass maybe, undermining his own more ambitious agenda. Barbara’s book is shorter, lighter, clearer, and has remained fresh, immediate and true. And in my view is the better for it.

Thanks to Too Late to Turn Back we are gifted not only an intimate observation of the young Graham Greene, but front-row seats on a candid journey the like of which we will never see again. Moon-full nights of singing, raffia skirts shaking to drums and harps, white flowers glowing in the fire-sparks, thunder, lightning, and the sound of ‘continuous laughter’. Two masked ‘devils’ on 20-foot-tall stilts sitting nonchalantly on a hut roof with their legs crossed. Streams, contaminated with guinea worm, smothered in butterflies. Bridges made of creepers, long armies of ants, bugs, fever, jiggers, weariness, stifling heat, stupefying boredom, and rats, rats, rats. When all thirty-two of the party are squashed together in a lorry, Barbara describes it as ‘one of the most utterly satisfying experiences I have ever had’. Out of her comfort zone into her comfort zone. Where Graham discovered he didn’t want to die, Barbara learnt she was resilient, tough, and very good at living.

The pity is that Graham Greene did not encourage his cousin’s writing. Four years after the trip, at the outbreak of the Second World War, Barbara had moved to Berlin, where in 1943 she married a junior German diplomat, Count Rudolf Strachwitz, whose circle of friends was involved in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler. ‘Rudi’ was taken prisoner by the Americans; Barbara, pregnant and closely watched by the Gestapo, fled from the Russian advance. She lost her baby, and only reunited with Rudolf in Liechtenstein in 1946. Her fortitude then is no surprise.

But let us end with Barbara and the carriers approaching a village in northern Liberia, the excited inhabitants waving branches while running and dancing beside them, as her party ‘doing quite complicated steps’ joins in. ‘In one place the men of the village made me get into my hammock, and four strong men picked it up and rushed me round and round at a tremendous pace, shouting with joy.’ Though Amadu’s eyes reproach her lack of dignity, Barbara’s glee is molten off the page. When Graham Greene later thinks of Africa he sees not a place, but ‘a shape, a strangeness, a wanting to know’. But the shape of Africa, which of course is the shape of the human heart, is what Barbara found.

Keggie Carew, 2022

Foreword

Almost fifty years have now passed since my cousin Graham and I set off so confidently and so ignorantly to walk through the jungles of a country that we knew almost nothing about. Liberia was indeed unexplored territory. Neither Graham nor I had been to Africa before, nor had we ever attempted a similar expedition. We were two innocents, our ignorance was abysmal, and we had no maps – because there were none. I was then twenty-three and Graham about five years older.

At that time Graham and I hardly knew one another, even though we had grown up in the same town. Graham’s father, Charles, was the headmaster of Berkhamsted School. He had a brilliant intellect and had originally intended to become a barrister, but he had taken on a temporary job at Berkhamsted while waiting to ‘eat his dinners’, found that he had a talent and a liking for teaching, and simply stayed on. His brother, my father, was very different. He had been removed from school at a rather early age as he was considered to be not at all clever. The eldest brother, Graham, was almost as brilliant as Charles but in a different, hard-working and conscientious, style, and he ended his career as Permanent Secretary at the Admiralty. But my poor father, instead of going to a university, was put on a farm by his despairing parents in the hope that he would somehow be able there to make up his mind as to what he intended to do with his life. During his year on the farm he developed an intense love of country life and an inferiority complex, and he suddenly decided that somehow he simply must go off, far far away. By chance he came across an article in some newspaper describing Brazil as the country of the future, and on the spot he decided to go there. He was right to do so. He very soon discovered that he had a genius for business and a true pioneer spirit, and for the rest of his life he loved Brazil. He was successful and became very prosperous and at the age of thirty-four he married my mother, who had just turned seventeen.

My father brought my mother to England after their marriage and this shy young bride, so used to a very different kind of life in Brazil, was suddenly surrounded by swarms, literally swarms, of Greenes, all of them full of energy and artistic and literary interests, and all of them perfectly convinced that the British way of life was the only true and right one, and firmly determined to teach her this lesson. It could not have been easy for her but she was young and adaptable and too busy with other things to be unhappy. By the time she was twenty-one she had had three children and, after a few years, she had three more. I was the eldest of the second batch.

My father then bought The Hall at Berkhamsted because by this time he had become great friends with his brother Charles, who had married a beautiful cousin and was producing the same number of children, corresponding in age more or less to our family. My cousin Graham belonged to the older group while I was in the lower category, and somehow there was always something of an invisible dividing line between the two groups, though of course we were constantly meeting at family parties, surrounded by endless relatives, and the nurses and governesses one had in those days. I remember my mother saying at the end of one summer that we had never been fewer than sixteen at table. That, of course, applied to lunch; we children were nearly grown up before we were allowed to come down to dining-room dinner.

The nursery regime, both in my family and in Graham’s, was a strict one and we had hardly any pocket money. Punctuality, bedtimes, prayers, and church on Sundays were immovable milestones, but on the other hand we – especially at The Hall – had huge gardens (a rose garden was specially laid out in memory of the gardeners who fell in World War I), ponies, tennis courts, a home farm (where we learnt to milk cows) and endless servants, who adored my mother and never left. There was always something going on; the gardens were thrown open at times for fêtes and garden parties in aid of charity, and our maiden aunts were constantly writing plays and pageants for us to act in. We all learnt a musical instrument and got up our own band, singing songs round the piano. Graham kept rather away from these activities at The Hall. His family were not musical, laying more emphasis on books, and reading became an important part of their lives. They were known as the intellectual Greenes and were always far better at school than any of us.

The Hall no longer exists. A housing estate now covers the entire property. But Berkhamsted School and the house where Graham grew up are, I believe, more or less as they were then, though the school has grown in numbers and there is now a ‘House’ named ‘Greene House’.

My father was not unique in our family in having a keen business sense. One of his uncles was Governor of the Bank of England; his town house was in Millionaires’ Row in Kensington and is now the residence of either the Russian or the Japanese Ambassador. The numbers have been changed so it is hard to identify it. My shy young mother had to endure many very long, heavy and boring lunches there, after which ‘carriage exercise’ was taken round and round Hyde Park, only to return to long and boring teas. Great-Uncle Benjamin left his millions to his only surviving child, an unmarried daughter, who, in her turn left half of it to a missionary society (on the condition that none of the missionaries were to receive any medical training whatsoever but only to preach the ‘pure word’), and the other half to a home for lost cats. I have a beautiful fan that belonged to her.

The family fortunes came at that time chiefly from large sugar estates in St Kitts in the West Indies. Various young members of the family – even boys of sixteen – were sent out to manage these estates, far from friends, far from any white companions, where they led sad, lonely lives until they died, usually at an early age. My grandfather (and Graham’s) died out there of yellow fever when on a visit. But the estates failed when sugar beet began to be grown in Europe and not even the mansion is left, though it is said that some of the local inhabitants have traces of Greene blood.

So it was that Graham and I had a more or less similar upbringing in our earliest years. I think Graham’s chief friend was my older brother and they went off for long and completely silent walks together. The gap of five years – so important in childhood – kept us strangers, and then of course we were later sent off to our boarding schools: Graham to Berkhamsted, which was difficult for him with his father as headmaster, and I to Somerset, for some unknown reason to a Quaker school, a school of such austerity as would not be tolerated today, but where I was supremely happy.

My father’s year on the farm in his early youth turned into a lifelong interest, and while he continued to go back and forth to Brazil, sometimes taking some of us with him, he also bought a property at Little Wittenham, near Oxford, which he turned into a model farm. We were there a lot in the summer and at weekends, but although Graham spent three years at Oxford I do not remember ever meeting him there. Later, when his brother Hugh was at Merton, I joined the university social life and he brought his friends to Little Wittenham. My eldest brother had been at Oxford but I had been a schoolgirl at the time, and my two other brothers went to Cambridge.

My parents also had a flat in London, but we were rarely allowed to go there except for visits to the dentist or for educational expeditions to museums, concerts or occasional theatres. Later, when we were all grown up, The Hall was sold and my father bought a house in Montagu Square which became my mother’s favourite home. I saw practically nothing of Graham for some years. He had married young and was busy building up his own life. My father suffered severe losses in the financial crisis of the early thirties, but by that time he was used to his own ways and there was little alteration in our style of life till World War II changed the old order for ever everywhere. Mercifully for him my father died in 1937.

Graham’s and my adventure together began when we met at the wedding reception of his brother Hugh, where we were all merrily drinking champagne – I think that was in 1935. Graham had already made his plans for going to Liberia. Travel books to out-of-the-way places were popular at that time, Graham had a family to provide for, and his publisher had advanced him the money for a new book. From childhood on he had enjoyed adventure stories and unknown Liberia sounded hopeful, but he did not like the idea of going alone. He was trying to persuade someone, anyone, to go with him, and only after everyone else had refused did he ask me and I promptly agreed to accompany him, though I had no clear idea of exactly where he was going to.

Next morning we both rather regretted this champagne decision, I because I was enjoying myself very much in London just then, and Graham because his heart sank at the thought of having to be responsible for a young girl he hardly knew. I told him on the telephone not to worry, my father would certainly forbid it. But now came what was perhaps the most unexpected part of the whole enterprise. ‘Papa,’ I said timidly, ‘I’ve done a very silly thing. I’ve told Graham I’d go to Liberia with him.’ My father, after only a moment’s pause, answered quietly but firmly: ‘At last one of my daughters is showing a little initiative.’ There was never any arguing with my father and Graham was quite in despair. He sent me endless hair-raising reports of conditions in the interior, lists of unchecked diseases, accounts of savage campaigns by local tribes and anything else he could lay his hands on. But he, as well as I, knew that there was really nothing we could do but accept the verdict, and in a fortnight we were on our way.

Whatever qualms Graham may have suffered, I think that my own reaction was chiefly one of excitement. Everything sailed along so quickly and perhaps I was also a little flattered by the attentions I was receiving. It was unusual then for young girls to adventure off into the wilds – but my father was in many ways an unusual man. Apart from getting my visa and some injections, I really had nothing else to do. I am ashamed now to admit that I had no idea how much work was needed when preparing for such an expedition, how the question of medical supplies (among a hundred other things) had to be gone into with great care, though that proved later to have been rather wasted work as nearly all our medical supplies were left behind in Freetown in the final rush. Graham saw to everything and I felt sure that he knew what he was doing, though I now wonder whether I really thought about it at all. Even my father, after giving Graham a cheque, seems to me now to have taken everything most casually. My path had always been cleared for me by others and I took it for granted. It was only later in the hard school of life that I finally learnt that help did not just fall like the gentle dew from heaven and that true results could be achieved only by personal effort and, more often than not, by hardship.

Graham and I were both rather shy people; as I have already said, we were really only acquaintances when we set out together and – strange though this may seem – we were still not more than friendly acquaintances when the long journey came to an end after three months. Even under the worst conditions we were invariably polite and courteous to one another; we never argued. If we disagreed on any subject we dropped it immediately, partly because the heat and sheer exhaustion drained all surplus energy. That was probably a good thing, for although it led to long silences the silences never became bitter or resentful. Graham took all the decisions and made all the plans. I merely followed. Looking back now I realise also that I was never, at any time, in the least bit helpful, but on the other hand I never, never complained. We got on well, respecting and liking one another, but when at the end we parted to go our separate ways, we said our friendly goodbyes with none of those hugs and kisses so common now, and we did not meet again for months – or was it even for years? – though we were always delighted to see each other when it happened.